t to give him a
proper school of surgery to practise in--genuine raw material, and
plenty of it, and you must help us to keep him in order. Fancy his
trying to convert us; he'll try to convert you next, if you don't mind!"

The girl paid no heed to the banter. She went on as if in a reverie.

"It is enough to bring a judgment on a nation, all the idle women and
idle men. Mamma told me that a brewer's wife paid two thousand pounds
for flowers in one month. Why cannot you speak to women?"

"We mustn't blame the poor ladies," said Fullerton: "how could they
know? Plenty of people told them about Timbuctoo, and Jerusalem, and
Madagascar, and North and South America, but this region's just a trifle
out of the way. A lady may easily sign a cheque or pack a missionary's
medicine-chest, but she could not come out here among dangers and filth
and discomfort, and the men ashore are not much pluckier. No; in my
experience of English people I've always found them lavish with their
help, only you must let them know what to help. There's the point."

"And you've begun, dear Mr. Fullerton, have you not?"

"Yes; but the end is far off. We were so late--so late in beginning, and
I must pass away, and my place will know me no more; and many and many
another will pass away. Oh, yes! we shall travel from gulf to gulf; but
I think, sometimes, that my soul will be here on the wild nights. I must
be near my men--my poor men!--and I'll meet them when their voyage is
over."

The enthusiast spoke solemnly, and his queer diction somehow was not
unbecoming or grotesque. I suppose George Fox and Savonarola did not use
quite the ordinary language of their day and generation.

The doctor listened with a kind look on his strong face, and when the
dark young girl quietly whispered "Amen!" our professor quite simply
repeated the word.

Tom Lennard had been going through a most complicated series of
acrobatic movements, and he now broke in--

"Ah! Harry Fullerton, if you're not an angel, you're pretty near one.
Ah! that eloquence is of the most--the most--a kind of--ah!
fahscinating--oh-h-h! fahscinating! But I believe this vessel has a
personal spite against me, or else the sea's rising."

"It is, indeed," said Mr. Blair, who had peeped out from the companion.
"We're actually running up to the fleet, and the rocket has gone up for
them to haul trawls. It looks very bad, very bad. You're not frightened,
Mrs. Walton, I hope?"

The reserved, s